Lindi Albert Lindegger Biography
Albert Lindegger was born in 1904 in the suburbs of Bern, where he attended school until high school and was given the nickname Lindi by his classmates, which later became a pseudonym and finally an official surname. He attended vocational school in Bern with Theodor Volmar and Philipp Ritter. The 21-year-old is participating in the Christmas exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern for the first time. His final decision to become a painter led him to move to Paris in 1926. Further training with André Lhote and Roger Bissière and friendships with Kurt Seligmann, Varlin and Alberto Giacometti characterize his first time in Paris. Albert Lindegger was already represented at the Salon d'automne in 1927. At the end of the 1920s he began to sign the drawings and caricatures and then the Lindi paintings, after using the initials AL. In 1931, together with the Bernese artists Tonio Ciolina, Max von Mühlenen and Hans Seiler, founded the group The Step Next. The political and socially critical caricature became significant for him and was included in French and Swiss newspapers and magazines. Lindi continuously cultivated this area of his work until his death. Extensive travel in the 1930s through Europe, the Balkans and North Africa led to a dramatic return from Tunis to Bern at the outbreak of the Second World War. Lindi became a biting critic of National Socialism and fascism, a draftsman of world affairs, accredited at international conferences and the Olympic Games. His studios are hotel rooms and lobbies. Since 1942 he illustrated works of world literature for the Gutenberg Book Guild. In addition to drawing and graphic prints, an immense pictorial work was created. There are also orders for public buildings and even ships on Lake Thun (1962, 1963). But Lindi also tried his hand as a cinematographic author and in the 1950s opened new creative areas with sculpture and ceramics, and later also glass and jewellery. In 1960 he married Marianne Murkowsky, and from 1965 the family lived with his sons Marc Albert and René in Agarone in the Canton of Ticino, where a rich late work was created in all the expressive and technical forms mentioned. Despite the severe blows of fate caused by the death of his son René and his wife, Lindi remains active as a witty contemporary critic, imaginative artist, adventurer and art comedian. 1972 retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern and 1982 large solo exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau. At a young age, Lindi rushed through all the styles that were popular at the time. The witty drawing and painting that followed Impressionism and Cubism were initially clearly separated. Lindi found her way to independence first in drawing, which quickly transformed into contemporary caricature, and later, through the group The Step Next, also in painting. He then moves from abstraction to representation and narrative content, which he ironically breaks down. The superficial pictorial joke, however, easily hides the fact that Lindi, as a virtuoso master of a wide variety of styles and techniques, from drawing and engraving to painting and graffiti to sculpture in a wide variety of materials, is primarily interested in implementation form. He describes his art as "liberated geometry". Beauty, composition, rhythm and vibration play an important role.
